There’s a common refrain throughout this whole debacle about how the warning signs about Zak were always there, or how people have been calling him out on this crap for years. If that’s true, and I have no reason to believe it isn’t, why did it take until now for the gaming community as a whole to do something about it? What more could have been done?
I’m not sure the answer is anything at this point, and I’m growing more and more confident that’s not the right question. Part of the reason these threads get bogged down in is constantly rehashing the past. So instead I wonder; where do we go from here? How do we do more than simply react to bad behavior, but instead actively prevent it? This is a community driven hobby; I refuse to believe that we lack any kind of social power. But how to harness it in a way that’s productive and constructive, rather than simply reactive and retributive (not that such actions are not also important and effective) is what I’ve been mulling over today.
I don’t have any answers just yet, but I’m curious if anyone does.
I think it's unrealistic to expect that the RPG hobby community will be wildly different from any other community - assuming it even makes sense to speak of
the RPG hobby community. The community/communities are just constituent elements of the societies they belong to, with members united by a shared interest in a particular leisure activity but not necessarily too much else.
I know nothing about angling as a hobby. If it turned out that a prominent figure in the angling hobby scene was a rapist or sexual harasser, and I happened to learn of that, I would be neither shocked nor not shocked. Many unpleasant people will have some hobby community they belong to, simply because many people in contemporary industrial urban communities have hobbies; and some unpleasant people - particularly the ones whose unpleasantness is likely to become widely known about - are prominent in their field.
If it turns out that angling, or RPGing, is
particularly attractive as a hobby for rapists and harassers, that's a different thing. It might suggest there is some pathological element to the hobby. But I don't know of any evidence that that is so, at least for RPGing, though if you think it is I'd be interested to hear about it.
Only once on these boards have I had a PM from someone who thought they could guess something about my political/religious beliefs from my RPGing preferences. As it happened, that person was wrong - but very polite about it, so I was in no way offended. But the lesson I take from that is that it is hard to generalise from the fact that someone enjoys RPGing, or even enjoys RPGing
this rather than
that, to broader features/attitudes/behaviours of the person.
And I think this can be true even for very prominent persons. I find that the RPG Pundit's forums convey a particular tone that, to me, is redolent of certain broader attitudes to culture and politics; yet - at least last time I was there - there were moderators whose posting icons/avatars were of Woody Guthrie with the writing on his guitar saying "This Machine Kills Fascists".
If we're talking about what members of the ENWorld community can do, I think one of the simplest things would be for fewer posters to default to masculine pronouns when referring to generic GMs, players etc. It's a very common practice on these boards that I nevertheless find somewhat jarring every time I encounter it.
